At the opening night of the Republican National Convention yesterday, Donald Trump picked his candidate for Vice President. The bad news: JD Vance is the worst possible person he could have picked. The good news: JD Vance is the worst possible person he could have picked.

Vance, the Republican senator of Ohio and a former venture capitalist with close ties to billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel, is in some ways a surprising choice for Trump – instead of balancing himself out with a more mainstream, conventional figure as he did with Mike Pence in 2016, he has opted for someone who is arguably even more extreme on social issues than himself. Vance is a hardline opponent of reproductive rights, which won’t make Trump’s election campaign any easier: the decision to repeal Roe v Wade, the law that guarantees the constitutional right to abortion, was deeply unpopular among the American public and remains the Republican Party’s greatest vulnerability.

Many of Vance’s other ideological positions – his opposition to no-fault divorce, for example – are likewise repellent to mainstream voters. He is, beyond his policy preferences, an off-putting man: smarmy, pompous and entirely lacking in charisma – a dork! His nomination should be a gift to the Democrats, and Trump-Vance should be an easy ticket to beat, but as an ailing, visibly declining Joe Biden refuses to stand down, it remains to be seen whether they’ll be able to capitalise on it. Should they fail to do so, it will be American women and minorities who pay the price.

Here’s everything you need to know about JD Vance.

He is Extremely Online

Vance is not only the first millennial to feature on a presidential ticket, but arguably the first groyper. At the same time as he was calling queer people “groomers”, he was – allegedly – involved in a group chat of young conservatives, some of whom were underage at the time. I don’t know anything about the content of these messages but, knowing what young Republicans are like, I’d be surprised if they were limited to polite discussion about trade policy and how best to minimise the national debt. Vance's Twitter account suggests that he is up to his neck in the darkest, most esoteric corners of the online right. A screenshot circulating today appeared to show him following a profile called ‘Bronze Age Loli Hitler Rape Groyper’ – charming! He also follows ‘Bronze Age Pervert’, an influential far-right writer who believes in “fascism – or something worse”, and he has appeared on a podcast hosted by Aimee Therese (if you don’t know, you really don’t need to).

Obviously, none of this stuff matters to anyone who doesn’t spend too much time on Twitter (“Listen, he follows a guy called Bronze Age Pervert!” is unlikely to be a winning message for the median voter), but the fact that Vance is adjacent to online communities which promote race science, eugenics and white supremacy is more than a little concerning. However bad his public opinions are, his private ones are surely even worse. 

He is a staunch opponent of reproductive freedom

It’s no surprise that a Republican senator is anti-abortion, but Vance’s position is particularly uncompromising. He doesn’t believe there should be exceptions for cases involving rape or incest (arguing that “two wrongs don’t make a right”), although he would grant exceptions if a mother’s life is in danger. “A Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history,” Mini Timmaraju, CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement.

One of Vance’s biggest political concerns is America’s declining birth rate (which you can almost always read as a code for declining white birth rate). He has consistently attacked people who choose not to have children, calling them “cat ladies” and suggesting they comprise “many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media”. He believes that porn should be outlawed because it’s stopping people from settling down and doesn't like Daylight Savings Time because it makes people less fertile. He opposes no-fault divorce and once seemed to suggest that people should stay in violent, unhappy marriages because the alternative is worse (he later denied this is what he had meant.) He’s in favour of people having children, but only on his own terms: he recently voted to block an effort to establish IVF as a nationwide right.

He is a danger to the LGBTQ+ community

For queer people in America, Vance is a dangerous pick for Vice President. He has leaned into the culture war as viciously as anyone and repeatedly endorsed the smear that LGBTQ+ people are "groomers" – a false narrative which has been associated with a spike in hate crimes and a raft of discriminatory legislation. During one interview with Fox News about sex education in schools, he said, “If you don’t want to be called a groomer, don’t try to sexualise six-, seven-year-old children. It’s really that simple."

Vance also “strongly disagrees” with the idea that LGBTQ+ people should be entitled to legal protection from discrimination, wants to repeal the Equality Act, and has introduced legislation which makes it a felony for doctors to provide trans young people with gender-affirming care – a policy which he would like to see instituted nationwide. While Vance has said that repealing gay marriage rights it not a priority for him, he opposes the “Respect for Marriage Act” which would codify it as a national right. If Trump wins with Vance as his Vice President, this could mark a further step back for LGBTQ+ rights in America, which have already come under significant attack over the last decade.

There is a terrible Netflix film based on his life

Published in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir about Vance growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio with an absent father and an addict mother, before eventually escaping to Yale Law School and a career as a venture capitalist. It became a bestseller and was met with rapturous reviews from the liberal media, who looked to Vance to explain the angst of the “white working class” following the election of Donald Trump. The narrative of Hillbilly Elegy is rooted in a conservative worldview: rather than the decline of industry or systematic economic neglect, Vance blames the people he grew up alongside for their own poverty, along with an overly-generous welfare system and a permissive culture which “increasingly discourages social decay instead of counteracting it”. The white working class, he argues, are hedonistic, financially irresponsible, ill-equipped to control their emotions and beset by a victim mentality.

Hillbilly Elegy is often dripping with disdain towards its subjects, but it also offers an idealised portrait of the white working class (specifically, those of Scots-Irish descent in the Appalachian region). As critic John Thomason argued in The New Enquiry, “even as Vance wags his finger at the vices of his fellow hillbillies, he cannot help but insist on the innocence of their whiteness” – a narrative which rejects the idea that there is any benefit afforded by whiteness and that anti-racist policies might be needed to counteract this, while at the same time suggesting that whiteness is being leveraged against white people and thus setting the stage for a more vengeful kind of racial politics.

Hillbilly Elegy was adapted by director Ron Howard for Netflix in 2020. Despite its starry cast – which included Glenn Close and Amy Adams – the film was considerably less successful than the book (it holds a “generally unfavourable” score of 38 on Metacritic). While Vance has gone from strength to strength, Amy Adams’s career has yet to recover.

He’s trying to position himself as a different kind of conservative (but he’s really not)

Vance is anti abortion, anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ+ and believes that climate change is overhyped, all of which is par for the course for a Republican politician. But for his supporters, he represents a radical shift with the status quo: a rabble-rousing populist who stands up to monopoly capitalism and strikes fear into the hearts of economic elites as well as oppressed minorities.

People said similar things about Trump in 2016 and there was an element of truth to this, at least at the level of rhetoric. But once Trump actually got into power, his anti-elite economic populism melted away and his most significant economic policy ended up being a series of tax cuts for the rich. You'd have to be extremely credulous to believe that Vance would be any different. Despite his preoccupation with increasing birth rates, he is opposed to most measures that would make having a family more achievable for ordinary Americans, including Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage, and free day care – which he described as “class war against “normal people”. If he becomes Vice President, America’s economic elites should be able to sleep soundly enough.

The narrative of Vance as a paradigm-shifter also applies to his foreign policy: because he has been somewhat critical of NATO and supports withdrawing military funding from Ukraine, he has been depicted as a figure who represents a break with the Washington consensus — an isolationist, even anti-war kind of conservative. But let’s not get carried away. Vance is no peacenik: he is still avidly pro-Israel, hawkish on both Iran and China, and has supported calls to invade Mexico. A Trump-Vance presidency would be a nightmare, but in some ways it wouldn’t be a radical departure from previous administrations. Whatever else happens, rest assured there will be tax cuts for the wealthy and ample money for bombing Palestinians.